Various methods of marketing exist. Some traditional methods of marketing include word of mouth marketing, e-mail marketing such as using spam e-mails, and utilizing internet cookie technology to track an internet user accessing a particular website. However, these traditional methods of marketing may be of limited effectiveness. In addition, many purchasers usually tend to shy away from these traditional marketing attempts or pitches. The conversion rate (i.e., the rate at which the targeted purchasers actually purchase the marketed products) may be very low while advertisers are under increasing pressure to lower the costs associated with marketing and to effectively and efficiently secure new customers.
In addition, traditional methods of marketing may be generally ineffective with respect to tracking and awarding individuals responsible for referring others that actually purchase products that are marketed. Word of mouth and e-mail based marketing efforts may be ineffective because they lack a mechanism in place for identifying who forwarded a marketing e-mail or who passed on the “word of mouth.” In other words, it may be difficult to identify who passed on the marketing information that resulted in an actual purchase of marketed products.
With respect to marketing with internet cookie technology, internet cookie may be used to track only one level of referral. One exemplary system that utilizes Internet cookies to track referrals includes Amazon Associates program. Specifically, participants of the Amazon Associates program may create and place links to Amazon.com on their websites. A potential purchaser may access Amazon.com through these links on the participants' websites. When a first purchaser accesses one of these links on a participant's website and makes a purchase from Amazon.com, Amazon.com provides a referral credit to the participant whose website link was accessed by the first purchaser. However, if the first purchaser refers a second purchaser to make purchase from Amazon.com via the same participant's website, only the participant would receive the referral credit, and the first purchaser would not receive any credit although the first purchaser may be the individual responsible for the referral.
Further, because traditional methods of marketing lack the ability to track more than one level of referrals, an advertiser using these traditional methods of marketing may not be able to learn how sales actually resulted and the relationships between all of the individuals, who contributed to the sales.
Systems and methods of the present disclosure improve upon the existing technology for referral tracking and awarding in a social network.